The present application relates to computing, and more specifically to software and accompanying mechanisms and methods for facilitating reusability and configurability of mechanisms for interfacing steps of a process-based software application with computing resources or operations, as may be provided by web services, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and so on.
Systems and methods for facilitating reusability of computing resources, e.g., web services and associated interfacing mechanisms, are used in various demanding applications, including mechanisms for implementing steps of a process-based software application (e.g., as may be described using Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN)) by calling external web services or APIs; implementing website widgets, e.g., shopping carts, and so on. Such applications may demand efficient user friendly mechanisms for enabling developers to define processes (or process steps) of a software application (e.g., a process-based software application) that call external web services or APIs, without needing to substantially alter the processes and associated interfacing mechanisms when deploying the software application to different computing environments.
Conventionally, process-based software application developers or designers may manually code instructions within the process steps to call external computing resources (e.g., corresponding to web services) so as to the meet the needs of a given process step. When the process-based software application is deployed to different computing environments, the developer must often manually alter code in the process-based software application to account for the different computing environments, e.g., differences in called endpoint Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), security parameters (e.g., login credentials and/or associated authentication mechanisms), and so on.
Such manual recoding and redeployment to different environments often not only requires a relatively high-level of technical expertise (including developer and deployment manager expertise), but is often time-consuming, and may require problematic shut-down of a running software application to enable alterations to the software application when changes in the computing environment necessitate such alterations.